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Mission Accomplished, a Journal Folds

As manifestoes go, this one didn't. The manifesto was to reject the idea of manifestoes. Here is how the journal The Public Interest defined its mission in its first issue, published in fall 1965:

"It is to help all of us, when we discuss issues of public policy, to know a little better what we are talking about - and preferably in time to make such knowledge effective."

To help, not to direct; to know a little better, not to know it all; and "preferably in time" to be effective, not to definitively offer findings.

As it turned out, this quarterly, which grew out of conversations between Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, had far more influence than that. After 40 years, Mr. Kristol and Mr. Glazer, along with the current editor, Adam Wolfson, decided to end publication with the current issue, in part because it had accomplished its mission.

Its friends and its enemies would agree: along with Commentary, The Public Interest became one of the intellectual pillars of neo-conservatism. It helped outline issues that later became the subject of national political debates. In its pages, Christopher Jencks proposed school vouchers (almost 30 years ago); supply-side economics received an early promotional thrust; and James Q. Wilson's ideas about crime and poverty attracted national attention.

But political influence was only part of the story. As Mr. Glazer and Mr. Kristol point out in farewell statements, much of the journal remained nonideological, indeed anti-ideological. (Mr. Glazer, though, is critical of what he sees as its later partisan tendencies.)

In the mid-1960's, its mild mission statement was actually a statement of dissent. "It is the nature of ideology to preconceive reality," the editors wrote, but "The Public Interest will be animated by a bias against all such prefabrications."

It may be difficult to see how rebellious this skepticism was in the cultural atmosphere of the time. Lyndon B. Johnson had been inaugurated president after winning 61 percent of the vote in 1964; 68 Democrats were in the Senate. Civil rights legislation seemed to promise an end to the nation's racial scars. The war on poverty was ramping up; so were ambitious plans to create a Great Society; so was the war in Vietnam. Urban crises were building but many believed that solutions were imminent. And on college campuses, political utopianism and fury were joining in a growing counterculture.

The founders of the journal - all of whom identified themselves as liberal, all of whom had voted for Johnson (and later for Hubert H. Humphrey), all of whom had grown up poor, and all of whom expressed discomfort with the sweeping solutions being proposed by reformers and their critics alike - proposed a re-examination of American society that, they said, would help them "know a little better what we are talking about." But they also strived to avoid the enthusiasms and exhortations that swirled around them.

At a moment when American culture was becoming identified with youth, a friend of the editors described the journal as a "middle-aged magazine for middle-aged readers."

But what would a middle-aged social science involve? A wariness of fast solutions, tempered expectations, deep misgivings. This could also be the sober response to an era of great expectations and demands for fast solutions. In fact, Mr. Glazer now writes, even that early wariness was insufficient, "Managing social problems was harder than we thought; people and society were more complicated than we thought."

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So it was easiest, perhaps, to challenge assumptions and preconceptions. In 1971, for example, Max Singer pointed out that the generally accepted statistics that heroin addicts in New York City were stealing some $2 billion to $5 billion worth of property a year were manifestly absurd.

Last fall, an article by Arthur C. Brooks analyzing a 2002 survey of Americans, showed that the caricature of cold-hearted conservatives had no basis in fact: expressions of compassion and charitable deeds had little correlation with liberal convictions and much correlation with religious faith.

But there have also been larger issues at stake. The journal's stance against ideologies meant that the grand gestures of social theory and Marxist analysis had to be left behind. What then would define "the public interest"? Could the idea of a public even be found in contemporary American culture?

Such questions inspired a series of special issues that still make compelling reading: on New York (1969), on universities (1968), on the American Commonwealth (1975) and on architecture and public spaces (1984). The questions raised were not just political, they were cultural. They were not just matters for legislation, they were matters for belief. These questions still arise in discussions of controversial art or in debates about ground zero development.

In such discussions, the political gets very personal. For just as Max Weber saw capitalism as an outgrowth of Protestant belief in heaven's rewards for good works, The Public Interest examined violence on campuses, the increasing numbers of unwed mothers, failures in education and the persistence of poverty, and saw not just economic or political phenomena, but cultural phenomena reflecting deeply ingrained beliefs or behaviors.

This also meant that change would be slow, an understanding of public life would be helpful, and matters of virtue and character would become crucial.

Gradually, of course, a set of doctrines took shape; perhaps, in some cases, they even turned into preconceptions. And maybe that too is a reason to bring the enterprise to a close.

But along the way, a little more came to be known, and surely, some knowledge was effective. One generation's intellectual project was successfully completed. Now it is another's turn to be middle-aged.

Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.